'Godzilla' Loses Teeth With $49M Opening, But Counter-Programming Excels For First Time This Summer With 'Rocketman' & 'Ma'
Even though Legendary/Warner Bros.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters led all movies at the domestic box office, it's with lackluster results as the lizard has fallen below his stateside projections with $49M per the studio – and some rivals even see the pic's 3-day lower at $47M. We're also hearing at this early stage that
Godzilla's overseas numbers may just be as ugly him.
While the weekend's wide entry tentpole incurred rust, counter-programming for the first time in an
Avengers: Endgame dominant summer proved it wasn't dead with Paramount's
Rocketman (around $25M) and Universal/Blumhouse's
Ma ($18.2M off $5M production cost) bound to be profitable film per Deadline sources.
Seriously,
Godzilla 2. Despite the efforts by Warner Bros.' marketing to distinguish this movie as a need-to-see moment on the screen, by dropping the trailer a little less than a year in advance last July, it's tired IP. Warners aimed to sell
King of the Monsters on its hippest quotient in trailers, that being
Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown in her first big movie, but the fact is Legendary's
Kong: Skull Island had a hipper cast with Marvel's Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston and nabbing Brie Larson on her upswing post Oscar win (and pre-
Captain Marvel). Instead of pushing
Godzilla in a hackneyed way with lots of noise in the trailer, Warners took a 180-degree approach by showing images of the monsters wrecking environmental havoc set against classical music, in a move to show "the wonder" of their calamity.
Still, when it comes to reinvigorating an IP as old as this, it's a job for a mouse in a wheel. Some financiers believe that for such fare, the production costs are way too high at $170M (some say
Godzilla 2 was more near $185M) in order to reach any kind of black ink margin.
Godzilla 2 had great exits, but arguably that Rotten Tomatoes score was the biggest repellent to keeping audiences away at 40% versus the first two Legendary monster pic's 75% certified fresh.
But again, who wants to see another near apocalyptic Roland Emmerich-like disaster movie with monsters? We just had
Pacific Rim Uprising last March,
Transformers is waning, and, yes, these movies get made for the booming Asian cinema market. But if overseas this weekend fails to reach $170M for
Godzilla, that's not good.
